How To Not Lose Yourself In A Relationship

P.C. Maksym Kaharlytskyi

“Look into his angeleyes, one look and you’re hypnotized.” – ABBA

Introduction

I’ve been doing the “dating” thing recently, and a subtle but terrifying thing keeps happening. When I’m seeing a guy I like, I start reorienting my life around him in tiny ways. I leave my late evenings open in case he wants to message me. I only make tentative plans with my friends because he might ask me out. Soon, I find myself sleeping over at his house in the middle of the week, leaving sleep-deprived and with a poor performance at work the next day. This seems harmless at first, but soon it snowballs. Within a couple of weeks, I’ve become a clingy, needy mess, a shell of my former independent self. And unsurprisingly, the relationship doesn’t work out because of this.

Strangely, when I have just myself to contend with, one could say that I’m a “responsible adult” (big words). I exercise regularly. I live in a cute, clean apartment where I feel safe. I put food on my table. But things have changed since I’ve decided I want to have children and am now looking for a more serious, long-term partner. Once I start dating someone, my entire life routine goes out the window.

It's a painful and annoying trap to fall into again and again. So, in this piece, I explore what this is and share everything I’ve learned on how to avoid it. I hope that by reading this you can somehow sidestep this shitstorm altogether.

Why does this happen?

On one extreme, I sound lonely and desperate for this guy to fall in love with me. This is partly cultural. In our culture, we are obsessed with love, fairytales, and happily-ever-after. This leaves women totally screwed. Even though I’m a feminist, I was raised on a diet of Disney princess movies like Snow White and Cinderella. At some level, I’ve probably internalized the toxic narrative that I’ve been bombarded with since my childhood: men rescue women.

On the other extreme, we have modern feminist ideals where women are throwing the idea of babies out with the bathwater. It’s projected that 1 in 4 young women today wish to remain childless, and almost 40% of young single people are not interested in dating. This is great for them because, as Cindy Gallop says:  

“The moment you decide you don’t want to be in love, that just takes a whole layer of crap out of your life.”

Life for single, childless people is simpler and easier, and they’re probably happier for it. But some of us want to have kids someday. Some of us are dating to find the father of our future offspring. We can bang on the drum of being an independent career woman all day. That is, until our life goals suddenly suggest a man’s presence might be helpful. So we let the guy sleep over at our house, even if we have a lot of important shit to do the next day, because we want him to like us. Ultimately, it’s like Cindy Gallop said,

“[As women, we] are taught to undervalue ourselves from the moment we are born.”

How can we get out of this? How can we learn to value ourselves, our routines, and our lives? Not just as some feminist theory, but in practice? Here is my non-exhaustive list of tips.

Please comment or reach out to me if you have additional ideas.

Tips

1. Remember that it’s your hormones. This guy does not have a magic dick.

Besides culture, biology is not helping us either. The physical desire I regularly feel to want to get pregnant is intense. Especially around the time of my period, I can feel myself trying to finagle ways to keep this man around for at least another week or two before I ovulate. I’m not even kidding.

The solution here is to remember that any one guy, whoever he is, does not have a magic dick. If you can pause for a moment and hold onto your horses, you’ll remember that you are still young and fertile enough, and you probably live in a major metropolitan city where you could go on dates every night if you wanted to. You can meet someone else. This is not your only chance ever to fuck. This man is probably not exceptional. Your hormones are fashioning this fake mirage to get you to attach to him.

Here’s what my grandmother had to say about this:

“It’s part of a woman’s base of understanding that you have this romantic streak. Because that’s what gets you pregnant, and it keeps the race going.”

So, before you deprive yourself of a good night’s sleep for an average dude, remember that this is Mother Nature trying to fuck with you. She’s trying to get you to reproduce. You can take a deep breath and pat yourself on the back before you cancel your entire day tomorrow. This man is not in love with you. This is just a spark set alight by your hormones. Hormones that have been designed to hook you, just like they’ve hooked every single one of your ancestors over the last billion years.

You must resist Mother Nature at all costs or perish.

2. Do A Reality Check

It can be fun to fantasize about our partners and our future lives together. But as we’re drawn out of our reality, eventually it will hurt a lot when we come back to Earth. As my grandmother said:

“It’s part of our nature to have this fantasy. You assume that the other party is going along with it, but they aren’t.”

For my entire relationship with Luís, I fantasized about him whisking me away to his family’s second home in Valle de Bravo (the Mexican equivalent of the Hamptons). Instead, he smoked too much weed and couldn’t plan more than lunch one day in advance. Another boyfriend I had spoke multiple languages and taught kids how to code. It took me months to realize he was not the future Amal Clooney on international peace-keeping missions. Instead, he was a software engineer with no idea what he wanted to do with his life.

So, let’s run a reality check on the person you are dating right now. Next time you have a moment away from your partner, ask yourself:

• Am I excited about dating this person as they are right now?

• What are they doing with their life right now? This is who they are.

• Am I happy with how they treat me and are they meeting my needs right now? (very important question)

This is hard. It means paying attention to the red flags. If this person has red flags, like a substance abuse issue of any kind, it means that no matter how you might feel about them, they’re probably not a healthy person for you to be with. Whoever this person is right now, that is who you are dating, not some idealized version of them.

3. Stick To Your Routine

“You have a life. You have other priorities, some of which come before him.” – Sherry Argov

When I’m dating a guy, being with him feels more fun and exciting than anything I do alone. But in her book, “Why Men Love Bitches”, Sherry Argov warns us not to get swept up in this. Her book is a relationship guide for women who are “too nice”, where “bitches” is more about her humorous tone than about men liking women who are cruel or mean.

Here is her advice for when you’re starting a relationship:

• “Don’t stop eating, sleeping, or exercising.”

• “If he wants to spend more time with you than you can comfortably do, invite him to join you in one of your activities.”

• “Force yourself to keep the routine you had before you met him. Once you lose your rhythm, you lose your psychological equilibrium, and you become needy.”

As much as possible, we must try to remember who we were before we met our partners.  

So, take a look at your calendar when you were last single. Do you have music, dance, or craft lessons scheduled in there? Do you have a favorite exercise class or friend activity that you do every week? Do you like to spend quality time with your dog, or at museums? These are the things that you like. They make you happy.

Even when we are in a relationship, we must keep doing these things.  

4. Have Some Self-Respect

“The nice girl treats her interests as “little things” or secondary. The bitch doesn’t treat her interests as minor or little things. They are her things.” – Sherry Argov

“People value you at the value you are seen to put in yourself.” – Cindy Gallop

This is a tough pill for me to swallow. In my single life, I do whatever I want and have my own life that I’m excited about. And yet, when I’m dating, I have found myself shimmying across the city late at night in an Uber because a guy invited me over late to his house after he finished band practice with his friends. The guy did make time to see me…sometimes. But I was way more likely than him to drop everything and see him when, in hindsight, it was inconvenient for me. This is all because I thought I had to be a sacrificial lamb in order to make our relationship work.

When we value ourselves more highly, people will value us that way, too. We’re only as valuable to our companies as the salary or financial worth that we’ve negotiated for ourselves. We’re only as respectable as what we say no to. Writing this piece is making it even more clear to me that female pleasure and the orgasm gap in heterosexual relationships is not the only aspect of our lives where we are subordinating ourselves in service of male contentment. We must learn to value our interests, priorities, and what we like in many aspects of our lives. And we should value them just as much, if not more, than the guy we are dating and what he likes.

Instead, being a doormat makes us unhappy and does not make men like us or respect us more. If anything, when we’re better at standing up for ourselves and prioritizing our health and sanity, the guy will respect us more for it. As Argov says,

“Suppose a woman says to a guy she can’t go on a date with him that night because of her weekly pottery class. He scratches his head and thinks, “She’d rather go to a pottery class than be with me?” It not only attracts him; it blows his mind.”

Realizing this, I feel frustrated because I’ve been throwing myself under the bus and cancelling all my plans in each relationship for all this time. My only solace is that if the problem starts and ends with me, it’s pretty clear who needs to change.

5. Set Boundaries, Even If It Feels Foreign And You Don’t Want To

“Power is the control you have over yourself.” – Sherry Argov

When it comes to seeing a guy, I can get very impulsive. “Love” feels fantastic. Why would I let “real life” get in the way when I’m forming an intense connection with someone so quickly? Fuck it, I think to myself. Who cares about work? Being a responsible adult is boring! I want excitement, adventure, and fun.

But when I talk about this with my therapist, she has another theory: I’m letting the feelings in my body take over without thinking logically about what I need. In my head, I know the importance of a decent night’s sleep. But when my heart is all wrapped up in the attention I’m getting from my partner in the moment, I immediately neglect every other need I have. Sounds fucked up? That’s because it is.

To avoid this happening to you, when you’re having some alone time and thinking clearly,  list all the things that you need in any given day. Then, follow that list as a set of your boundaries, and try to enforce them (even if you do not want to!) when you are with your partner.

For example, on any given day, I need:

1. Eight hours of uninterrupted sleep

2. Three meals of relatively healthy food with no white bread

3. A shower with warm water and a clean towel in the morning

4. Time to work, meet with friends and follow my weekly schedule

If you’re like me and you struggle to know what you need, ask your close friends about it. They probably have some of your answers. Are you really into cleanliness, so you need your special shampoo and soap? Are you vegan, so you need to go to a restaurant with appropriate options? I recently ended things with Luís because he’d never message me in the evenings when I wanted to check in at the end of the day. Did I need him to message me? Kind of. It would have helped me to feel that he was interested in me and willing to put effort into our relationship.

6. Stay At The Center Of Your Own Orbit

In my last relationship, I spent many weekday nights hanging by my phone in desperate purgatory, waiting for this guy to text me. Then, I’d complain about it to my therapist later about how abandoned I felt by him.

This week, after a month of torture, I had a breakthrough about this when I was journaling. This is what I discovered:

Yes, it’s my real life journal. Can you read it?

“Just because you meet a guy, you are still you. That’s what you need to realize. It’s not that these men are abandoning you. It is that you are abandoning yourself. So keep a hold on who you are. If you need sex, have sex. If you need physical touch, have physical touch. But do not change the orbit of your world to fit this other person. Your world is amazing. The world you are building for yourself is amazing. If the man is the Earth, well, then you are the Sun.”

Now I’m seeing that the work I need to do in a relationship starts way before the point where I feel abandoned by this guy. I need to go back to those tiny, seemingly insignificant ways that I am giving up myself and my time at the beginning of the relationship and stick to my priorities in my everyday life. This is how I will stop the cycle of abandoning myself.

Conclusion: Keep Learning From Your Mistakes

“Don’t look too deep into those angeleyes” – ABBA

For complex reasons that could take up many Ph.D. theses, as women, we may be subordinating ourselves in unhealthy ways when we get into relationships with men. So, if you can put even one of the tips I’ve mentioned here into practice, that’s something you can be proud of.

Finally, remember to be kind to yourself. You are learning. If you skip work calls because you had a late one with your lover last night, forgive yourself. Be compassionate towards yourself because it can be excruciating to learn these things while you’re dating someone and then the relationship doesn’t work out for whatever reason.

Because we have so few examples in our culture about what a healthy heterosexual partnership looks like, and because our hormones are so freaking persuasive, this is going to be hard. We’re bound to keep making mistakes. But there is one thing we can try to do. As one of my favorite business leaders, Christina Wodtke puts it:

"Make new mistakes."